Staff writer, with CNA

Fri, Jul 26, 2013 - Page 14

Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) ranked as the fifth-biggest chip supplier to China last year, according to a research report released yesterday.

Market information advisory firm IC Insights said the world’s largest contract chipmaker sold US$470 million of chips in China last year, up from the US$366 million recorded a year earlier.

TSMC, US-based Intel Corp and South Korea’s SK Hynix Inc were the three major foreign chip suppliers to China last year, IC Insights said.

It said Intel took the title as the largest IC supplier to China with sales of US$2.38 billion, while SK Hynix had US$2.36 billion in sales, China’s Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corp (SMIC, 中芯) had US$1.70 billion and Hua Hong Grace Semiconductor Corp (華虹) had US$600 million.

TSMC’s sales generated from the Chinese market are expected to continue to grow and hit US$830 million in 2017, which will help the firm retain its title as the fifth-largest chip supplier to China, IC Insights said.

Intel’s sales in China are expected to hit US$4.5 billion in 2017, ahead of SK Hynix with an expected US$3.3 billion in sales, SMIC with an anticipated US$2.8 billion and Hua Hong Grace with an estimated US$1 billion, the report said.

China is expected to continue to depend heavily on chip imports through 2017 as demand from the Chinese market keeps growing significantly, but domestic production has failed to expand rapidly enough to play catch-up, the report said.

Chip sales in China are expected to total US$139 billion in 2017, while sales of China-made chips are forecast to reach only US$20 billion, which will make up 14.4 percent of the total sales in the market, the report said.

Last year, sales of China-made chips hit US$8.9 billion and accounted for about 11 percent of total chip sales, which were worth US$81 billion in the Chinese market, IC Insights said.

It said that although sales of China-made chips are expected to rise at a compound annual growth rate of 17.6 percent during the period from last year to 2017, China would remain heavily reliant on imports.